5 Feb
2018
5 Feb
'18
8:31 p.m.
The unit, the MX20 is really nothing more than a supporting instrument. It can bring up
charts and other information but obviously there are backups.
Indeed, it has given me the (upside down) blue screen of death. It’s also auto rebooted
itself a few times for errors it caught (either watchdog timer or user-mode protection
faults).
The thing is kind of memory starved I think and really involved weather radar downloads
tend to crash the thing.
I’ve done some other stuff in planes, not related to flight systems. We built up a
couple of image systems and one situation monitor, and later video gear. There’s rules
for what goes in planes (at least for the military). We used some real time Linux
variants at times.
I did actually interview with GE right out of college to work on the 767 flight controls.
Now that is some scary bit of software. There were two units, if one fails, the other
takes over. If both fails, it writes the error code into non-volatile memory so it can
be retrieved from the wreckage.